The present disclosure relates to electronic printers and printing systems, and more particularly, to a hierarchical architecture for a distributed and scalable network printing system.
A network environment generally includes many electronic printers and printing systems. Each electronic printer and printing system can be referred to as an electronic printing system (EPS). In order to increase the reliability and performance of the network environment, typically, slower electronic printers and printing systems are replaced with faster, and perhaps, much larger, electronic printers and printing systems. Once replaced, the slower electronic printers and printing systems do not contribute to the network environments's overall reliability and performance.
Additionally, in the network environment, it is typical that some of the electronic printers and printing systems are overloaded which lead to processing delays, while other electronic printers and printing systems are underused which presents an inefficient use of the network environment's resources. The network environment does not have a mechanism for routing print data from one electronic printer or printing system to another to facilitate quicker processing of the print data.
It is an aspect of the present disclosure to provide a hierarchical architecture for a distributed and scalable network printing system which overcomes the drawbacks in the prior art.
It is another aspect of the present disclosure to provide a hierarchical architecture having a hierarchical set of networked printer components for a distributed and scalable network printing system.
It is still another aspect of the present disclosure to provide a hierarchical architecture for a distributed and scalable network printing system for increasing the reliability and performance of a network environment through redundancy of networked printer components.